The Digital Commonwealth’s 19th Annual Conference will be held online via Zoom on Tuesday TENTATIVELY April 29, 2025 from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM US East Coast Time. Digital Commonwealth’s Conference Committee invites interested speakers to submit abstracts of 1 page or less in length for presentations centered around the theme: Ethics and Access: Treating Users and Collections with Care.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:


  *   Exploration of ethics in AI use in the cultural heritage space and guidelines developed for its use or to mediate potential harms,
  *   Sharing collection guidelines, policy, or programming around collections that contain sensitive or harmful materials,
  *   Rapid response collecting, especially related to highly charged or politicized events,
  *   Creating policies for responsible access to digital collections and/or implementing responsible access to digital collections,
  *   Sharing policy and practices that incorporate decolonial values and inclusivity,
  *   Strategies to best support and advocate for the staff who process and digitize materials.

Proposals for individual presentations, being a panel participant, joint proposals for a panel, or a planned interactive dialogue between 2-3 people, will be considered for inclusion. Speakers/projects do not need to be in Massachusetts to be considered.

Abstracts should be submitted by email no later than November 18, 2024 to [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>. Selections will be contacted in January with an invitation to speak and a firm date for the conference. Please email any questions to the same address.

About Digital Commonwealth
Digital Commonwealth is a non-profit collaborative organization that provides resources and services to support the creation, management, and dissemination of cultural heritage materials held by Massachusetts libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives. Digital Commonwealth currently has over 200 member institutions from across the state.

Digital Commonwealth’s mission is to provide access to thousands of images, documents, and sound recordings that have been digitized by member institutions so that they may be available to researchers, students, and the general public. Digital Commonwealth provides a single point of online access to digital assets hosted by Massachusetts cultural institutions. It also serves as a repository for hosting an institution’s content. Free digitization services are provided by the Boston Public Library as part of the Library for the Commonwealth program. Our member institutions include libraries, museums, historical societies, archives, research institutions, and other organizational repositories of our cultural heritage.

Massachusetts Collections Online: digitalcommonwealth.org<https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/>
Membership and Programming: digitalcommonwealth.wildapricot.org<https://digitalcommonwealth.wildapricot.org/>

—
Chelcie Juliet Rowell (she, they)
Associate Head of Digital Collections Discovery
UX & Discovery

[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
617-495-4561

1 Harvard Yard, Cambridge, MA 02138
Lamont Library, A-10

HARVARD LIBRARY
Champions of Curiosity
dcd.library.harvard.edu<https://dcd.library.harvard.edu/>